Excerpts from sleeve notes:

Charlotte Hug is a violist, an improviser, and a performer, who has combined
a classical musician's background with a training in scenic design at the University
of Art and Design, Zürich. Her work is shot through with dialogic processes, each
of which is enacted in its own particular dimension. There is for example the spatial
dimension: Charlotte Hug has played in the icy caverns of the Rhône Glacier as well
as in an acoustically insulated S & M torture chamber, and has pursued her musical
researches in both of these emotionally charged sites. And, despite her use of such
idiosyncratic inventions as the 'soft bow' (a bow whose hairs have been rendered
completely slack), it is the space in which she performs that is allowed to provide
the form for her improvisations.

She also enters into dialogue with visual signs. Charlotte Hug's improvisations
and her so-called sonicons serve as the associative and, indeed, seismographic underpinning
for her further improvisations. Thus the musical identity of her performance pieces
grows out of a dialogue between the visual and the acoustic.

Then there is her dialogue with electronics. Charlotte Hug experiments with the
possibilities of electronic music, including both canned and live electronics in
her compositions. But although the range of sounds on the current CD is influenced
and inspired by electronics, the music on NEULAND is in fact an homage to
acoustic performance, an effort to exhaust its potential and to expand its horizons.

NEULAND: during a stay in London, Charlotte Hug joined the London Improvisers
Orchestra and threw herself into an intense encounter with improvised music. In
order to process the abundance of material produced by the experience, itself both
familiar and strange, she retreated to an uncanny site of inspiration, the House
of Detention, a former subterranean prison in the middle of London. Its maze-like
system of tunnels, doors and chambers, dimly lit and dripping with damp, was to
become both her prison and her refuge: the place presented itself as an incubator
for new improvisations, as well as for Delirium and House of Detention,
two new pieces. Here Charlotte Hug also pioneered the technique known as 'wetbowing',
moistening the hairs of her bow so as to produce a new range of sounds.

The solo improvisation on NEULAND circles thematically around the unknown
and the new, that which was already there but had not yet been discovered; it is
the union of the unconscious and the conscious.

NEULAND tells of the quest for form and identity, a quest that takes its
pilgrims on a road of many turns, many forks, many doorways to unknown rooms. To
Charlotte Hug, improvising means travelling this road, knocking on doors and exploring
new spaces. NEULAND is thus a musico-spatio-visual adventure, a voyage into
a world of brand new sounds and noises. Its third part, No Land, represents
a break with the musical introspection of Delirium and House of Detention,
the first two parts. While Delirium plays on the experience of surplus and
confusion, and House of Detention constitutes an immersion in unconscious
process, a retreat into an internal dialogue, No Land is Charlotte Hug's
attempt to extend the borders: as space upon space unfolds, the music allows its
audience a personal voyage into terra nova. 'What I am trying to do is create imaginary
spaces,' says Charlotte Hug. While she herself may have been inspired by actual,
existent spaces, however, her music uses a whole range of sounds - clear, stable
and multilayered, unstable, percussive and mercurial rhythms - to produce imaginary
spaces, always in dialogue with sounds she has already produced, with the score
as written, with her instrument, the objects she uses to produce resonance, the
acoustics of the room in which she is performing.

There comes a moment in which the piece finds its own identity, 'its temperature,
its sense of time, its own outlines'. That is precisely the moment at which Charlotte
Hug steps before the public, all of which means that the tracks on NEULAND
represent the latest state of her improvisational work, as well as of her research.
'Is this musical performance? Is it a composition or is it an improvisation? It's
the intersection of all three,' says Charlotte Hug.

NADINE OLONETZKY (2002)
Translated by RAFAËL NEWMAN

Excerpts from reviews:

"More than warmly recommended: indispensable!"

GUSTAVE CERUTTI - IMPROJAZZ 2003

"Though classically trained, Hug clearly gravitates toward the kind of
non-idiomatic Emanem loves to sponsor. It's fantastic that she has begun to carve
out her niche as a solo performer because frankly, though I've been much impressed
with her playing elsewhere, this is the finest thing I've heard Hug do. The majority
of the disc is comprised of the House of Detention suite, inspired by an
underground prison. Hug is apparently quite attracted by odd performance spaces
or settings such as this one (even though the album here was recorded in studio).
If it inspires the kind of wondrous music heard here, someone donate your frequent
flier miles to Ms. Hug. The suite is quite a journey, commencing with the near-silent
buzzing of Wet, through the rough slashing of Dweller, the drone of
Dwell On, the anguished whining of Wood, all the way to extraordinarily
harsh tracks such as Rotation, which sounds like a pair of heavy boxes
being dragged along a sandy floor (though there are light pizzicato interjections
which spoil the image). Hug uses wet and slackened bows to achieve some extraordinary
effects, and she seemingly tortures the instrument's body too; but she is capable
of great legato playing as well, at times creating a dizzying effect akin to a
Morton Feldman piece being played very quickly and backwards. There is so much
going on in most of these tracks - from dense washes of harmonics and overtones,
lots of mad glisses and double-stops, to sudden silences - that she creates the
impression of a chorus effect or multi-tracking (neither of which are used here).
A radical but winning disc."

JASON BIVINS - CADENCE 2003

"During her recent stay in London, Swiss violist Charlotte Hug discovered
the House of Detention, a damp and claustrophobic subterranean prison that
inspired the ten-movement suite of the same name that forms the central part of
this extraordinary solo album (her second). No stranger to odd performance space
(she's also played in ice caves in the Rhône glacier and soundproofed torture
chambers), Hug uses her surroundings as a means of exploring the acoustic reality
of her instrument, by reinterpreting her own improvised drawings ('Sonicons')
made on site - with extraordinary results. Incredible as it may seem, there is
no multitracking or electronic jiggery-pokery on NEULAND: instead, Hug,
like Greek cellist Nikos Veliotis (also resident in London until recently), has
gone right back to basics - the bow. On Delirium she uses a 'softbow'
(Veliotis calls his variant a 'Bachbow'), with a special lock on the frog that
allows her to play all four strings of the instrument simultaneously. Elsewhere,
she uses a 'twistbow' and a 'wet bow' (pretty self-explanatory, but you should
hear the sounds they produce), and various preparations and scordatura
(different tunings), but the majority of the amazing sounds she produces originate
in standard string techniques pushed to the limit. Authentic extended technique,
if you will.

All of this might sound rather dry and technical, but the music that results
is spellbinding, visceral and disturbing. In the brief history of improvised music
there have been plenty of great solo bass albums, and a handful of top-notch solo
violin albums (Michael Goldstein and Phil Durrant's work comes to mind, though
for sheer extremes only Polly Bradfield's long deleted Parachute album comes close
to this), but so far the sonic potential of the viola has remained unexplored.
Not any more. Forget the dreary anaemic twiddling of Mat Maneri - NEULAND
is best goddamn thing that's happened to the viola since Berlioz's Harold In
Italy."

"In order to make her own niche in the world of European free improvisation,
Charlotte Hug has developed new bowing techniques on the viola. She has found
sounds that, while one hundred per cent acoustic in nature, evoke the microscopic
textures of crackling analogue electronic improvisation (think Voice Crack, in
particular). Hug often performs in semi-electronic contexts, but to this day her
most convincing music has been acoustic, whether in Tony Wren's Quatuor Accorde
or in trio with Maggie Nicols and Caroline Kraabel. NEULAND supersedes
all of her previous efforts, even her first solo album
MauerrauM WandrauM.
Her techniques, which involve moistening the hairs of the bow or loosening them
to the point where they offer no resistance and leave no space between string
and wood, have come to full fruition. Focused on sound and texture rather than
pitch or rhythm, her music fascinates because of its unheard-of sounds - or repulses
for the same reason. But repeated listens reveal beyond the novelty and apparent
abstract nature of her improvisations a wide range of emotions (some very crude)
that speak to us in a gripping way. The 40-minute suite House of Detention
(in 10 parts) presents a number of well-defined and developed ideas that showcase
Hug's original playing without making a demonstration out of it. The music remains
intimate, hardly escaping the artist's personal sphere, but it doesn't have the
sparseness of Berlin reductionism or any approach favouring silence as sound.
The suite is bookended by two 10-minute pieces, both more extroverted and at times
verging on the frantic. NEULAND is a landmark in Hug's career and comes
highly recommended."

Much of NEULAND was inspired by Charlotte Hug's trip to what used to
be a prison, a system of damp tunnels underneath London. If anyone ever makes
a movie that's set there - ceilings dripping, doors creaking, inmates screaming
and banging their fists against the bars - NEULAND would be the perfect
soundtrack.

Developments in electronics have already allowed musicians like Joritt Dijkstra,
Sylvia Hallett and Tyondai Braxton to make improvisation-based solo music that
as rich and complete as most recordings featuring full bands. Incredibly, Hug
does the same thing without any overdubs or processing. Unlike many improvisers
making solo albums, Hug doesn't sound like she's performing the same way she would
in a trio or a quartet. In fact, NEULAND sounds so finished, so
cinematic and colourful, that it's hard to imagine what anyone else could possibly
add to it. Whereas many solo improv albums ask the listener to accept them as
solo recordings, NEULAND asks the listener only to accept it as a recording.
NEULAND isn't simply a showcase for Hug's technique or her phrasing, but
a rich, powerful record that screams and cries and evokes.

Hug plays the viola, an instrument that's usually best suited to single note
lines and simple chords. Here, though, Hug often creates a variety of effects
at once. She often uses a special bow with which she can play all four strings
simultaneously, allowing her to fill more space than would usually be possible
using only one viola. She also uses a number of preparations and extended technique
effects, often playing several different kinds of sounds at the same time. When
Hug is playing noises that resemble those typically made by string instruments,
NEULAND often sounds like a string orchestra.

Elsewhere, Hug scrapes, knocks and wheezes away, inspired by not only the
textural possibilities of electronic music, but also the avant garde's attempts
(like Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima or Helmut
Lachenmann's Gran Torso) to stretch the boundaries of string instruments.
Whereas Penderecki's and Lachenmann's experiments were closely controlled, however,
Hug's are more open-ended and loose, guided mostly by her graphic notations and
the spur of the moment. Which returns us to the fact that NEULAND was
mostly improvised, and there isn't much solo improvised music that sounds like
this. Its dark textures and creative performances make NEULAND one of the
best improv albums released so far this year."

"Anyone who deems digital recording inert simply hasn't heard this marvelous
recording. The bristly scrape of wetted bow (she loosens and dampens the horsehair
to obtain new sounds) on strings, the thwack of hand on wood, the reverberations
of sound escaping the hole, Hug's captured them all and reproduced them with a
palpable presence that is key to NEULAND's success. The liner notes indicate
that this music is a mixture of improvisation and composition inspired by the
dank confines of a disused prison, but methodology only gets you far - this wonderful
disc delivers the goods. What keeps me coming back to it is Hug's compelling
organization of a wide range of vivid sounds, from comely whistles and sighs to
coarse groans and hysterical squiggles. They can be quite harsh, but never ever
ugly, and often quite lovely. In my line of work, I hear plenty of records that
I play, appreciate, then file away. This is one I've already played again and
again."

BILL MEYER - SIGNAL TO NOISE 2003

"Charlotte Hug plays viola, which in itself is a wonderful instrument.
Sustaining more than a hour of solo improvisation could be a very difficult task
for anyone, but Hug has a 'light' quality in her playing that transforms everything
- even the most difficult sections - in a kind of graphic gesture always perfectly
comprehensible. There are parts in this record that really transported me in a
magic realm, particularly when glissandos or slightly dissonant chords are used
in spectacular fashion: at that point one can't avoid being kidnapped in a sort
of incantation. Elsewhere, the sounds get more 'concrete' and the instrument gets
treated like a source of several noises...or silences, if you will. Technique
and maturity go together in yet another important release by this most fundamental
English label."

"Charlotte Hug (pronounced Hoog) herself is a dramatic performer, strikingly
beautiful, with flowing blonde locks. That in itself can be a problem, as a recording
alone can fail to convey the essence of a performance. NEULAND, though,
is a studio recording of Hug's solo viola and certainly does avoid that potential
pitfall; the music here is full of drama and needs nothing to enhance or complement
the experience. It consists of three tracks, one of which, House of Detention,
is subdivided into ten parts. The opening track Delirium features the technique
developed by Hug called 'wetbowing', literally moistening the hairs of her bow.
The resulting sounds can be far more brutal than one would expect, but there are
also very poignant, moving periods. Hug is certainly not seeking to build or sustain
a consistent mood; this is rapidly changing music containing great contrasts.

In the past, Hug has experimented with electronics in her compositions and,
although all the music here was produced acoustically, several passages seem to
bear the influence of that, with the recorded sound of the viola easily being
mistakable for synthesised sound.

House of Detention is at the heart of the album, consisting of ten relatively
short connected pieces. It is named after a dank, supposedly-haunted former underground
Victorian prison in Clerkenwell, which Hug used as a retreat while in London.
It manages to convey an atmosphere of unease and menace entirely consistent with
its title."

"Charlotte Hug is a brilliant violist, improviser and performer who uses
such idiosyncratic inventions as the 'soft bow' (a bow whose hairs have been rendered
completely slack). The space in which she performs is allowed to provide the form
for her improvisations and the music grows out of a dialogue between the visual
and the acoustic."

"Well, I never have heard the music of this amazing musician before. She
plays the viola with a lot of technique and inspiration. Here she is extremely
spontaneous, creating improvisational phrases and sounds that amaze because of
their variations and different textural qualities. Here everything is about spontaneity
and Charlotte Hug´s sounds are really extreme and at the same time really coherent
delivering different moods according to the paths that she wants to explore. This
album has over one hour of free improvisation that breaks constantly musical paradigms
and stretches boundaries with originality and inspiration. A really good work
that will appeal to spontaneous music lovers."